Obamacare Tragedy Watch

Image by Peter Laird.

As the heartrending stories of the Obamacare victims who liked their plan and couldn't keep it begin to dwindle away, on account of almost none of them being in any way true, the rightwing propaganda against the Affordable Care Act is having to shift its attentions to a somewhat different angle, that of the spurious quantitative study; and we would be well advised to pay these some attention of our own, because you know they're going to end up on the lying lips of John Boehner and the like.

Right now, for example, the chicken coop (Daily Caller, Breitbart, Townhall, and so on) is clucking its collective head off over an egg laid by a trio of scholars from Grand [jump]
Valley State University in Grand Rapids alleging that Western Michigan may have lost, or at least failed to gain, up to 1000 jobs owing to the ravages of the Affordable Care Act as it swept, tornado-like, through the region. (The URL for the Townhall coverage is, hilariously, http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2014/01/18/thanks-obamacare-1000-jobs-lost-in-west-colorado-n1780808, because they apparently typed their headline before learning where the tragedy took place, and to these Heartland conservatives Michigan and Colorado are pretty much the same place.)

Or maybe not. The paper, by economists Leslie A. Muller, Paul Isely, & Adelin Levin, and not so much published (let alone peer reviewed) as dumped online by the senior author on his faculty account,  reports:

The survey was sent out to 918 businesses in KOMA [i.e., Kent, Ottawa, Muskegon, and Allegan counties] in early October 2013. In all we received 174 responses, for a response rate of 19%. 

The initial sample was chosen randomly from a database of KOMA employers who had 50 or more employees in 2011. The Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center at GVSU supplied the names and addresses of the CEOs for each company. Although all of these firms reported more than 50 employees, 32 percent of the sample reports less than 50 full time employees.

How's that again? The randomly chosen initial sample was the 918 businesses that received the mailing? (Chosen randomly how, exactly? how many employers were on the list?) But "all" of them reported how many employees they had, or just the 174 that sent back a response?

Sign from Etsy.

It's not clear how many of the respondents knew that the employer mandate doesn't kick in until 2015 or that it never applies to the 32% with fewer than 50 full-time workers (many of those CEOs clearly did not know, as they merrily reported plans to cut hiring even though there would be no reason for it under the Act). Since 93% of the companies with more than 50 employees already provide their employees with health insurance, it's hard to see how the ACA will affect them at all. It may be that these are high-deductible plans that will be canceled next year and need to be replaced by plans with higher premiums, but

firms are containing costs by passing them along to their employees. This trend has been evident before the ACA was passed, but has since accelerated in anticipation of higher costs. The results show that 49 percent of employers have already increased the share of costs for the employee because of the ACA, while 40 percent are considering this option.

Moreover,

The ACA has increased the percentage discount in premiums a worker may receive if he achieves employer-set health standards, and firms are taking advantage of this. Workers may receive  anywhere from 30 to 50 percent off their premium, which is quite an incentive to participate in wellness plans.

So it's pretty clear all around that the 22% of employers who reported that they were going to reduce hiring because of the Act were the ones who really didn't know what they were doing, perhaps because they were the unfortunates who reported getting their information from the News Media or Other.

The bottom line, though, is that the sample size is just too small, and the possibility of selection bias animating the few who responded too great, for the results to have any actual significance. It should be taken, in other words, as Tyler Cowen generously says, "with a grain of salt"; or, in the cruder terms of commenter Michael, is "worthless".

Chicken co-op for urban farmers by RAAD. Via The Jailbreak.